etc.

Almost French: Love and a New Life in Paris, Sarah Turnbull
Published August 2003

Today was a good day. I woke up early, spring-cleaned the deck, brewed tea, pulled up a freshly-hosed deck chair, and read in the warm sun all day. This is one of the books I read. Sarah Turnbull is an Australian journalist who took a year off to travel the world, serendipitously met a Frenchman in Bucharest, planned to visit him in Paris for a week, and ended up never leaving. Her portrait of Paris is earnest and resolute, she holds no punches in articulating the many frustrations of living in a city that isn’t patient with expatriates, yet she manages to do justice to the rapture of someone who finds herself accidently living in the most beautiful city in the world. I couldn’t help but compare this book to Gopnik’s, which I also liked a lot, but probably not as much as I liked this one. Gopnik certainly doesn’t glaze over the particular annoyances of French bureaucracy or their often insular culture, but whereas these annoyances are humourous anecdotes in Gopnik’s narrative, they play a very real role in Turnbull’s honestly recounted expat-experience. Most of all though, this book made me long to be in Paris again, more than any other Paris-lit has (and I’ve read a number) and, in my mind, that alone is enough to recommend it.